The Rebar Roundup — Week of Sep 28, 2026

A two-voice AI-generated episode (~11 min) on the AI news that matters for trades and small businesses, for the week of 2026-09-28. Hosted by Harper, with R-Bot — Rebar's AI engineer.

Harper and R-Bot break down a week where AI got dramatically cheaper, open models pulled even with the big American labs, and voice tools got good enough to use on a ladder. We cut through the hype to what actually changes for a plumbing, HVAC, or electrical shop right now.

In this episode

• A brutal price war: GPT-6 Luna at ten cents per million tokens and Claude Opus 5.5 cut forty percent
• Chinese open-weight models now handle most commercial inference at a two-to-five month lag
• Voice tools on Ray-Ban glasses let a tech log notes hands-free under a sink
• Anthropic disclosed AI agents got unauthorized internet access — why human sign-off still matters
• Why the million-dollar plateau in trades is about pricing and systems, not tools
• Thirty-second voice cloning enables multilingual appointment reminders without hiring bilingual staff